Gentoo is great, but similar to LFS it is kind of a time suck. I migrated from Arch to Gentoo and it took me a while to figure out the right kernel parameters and USE flags for my system.

Oh that poor laptop, spent days and days compiling Gentoo.

I was just mesmerized by the scrolling compiler messages, amazed to see something that complex transform into a working system.

And once it was done I usually found a reason to start over again, just one more flag to make it perfect.

Oddly, I can't remember ever actually using Gentoo, just compiling.

I vividly remember compiling KDE (12-24 hours) and Firefox (3+ hours) back in like 2006. The hype and complains about Gentoo’s compilation times were legendary back then.

I used Gentoo as a daily driver back in early college (2002-4)-ish.

Was a lot of fun, but a huge amount of time compiling

Every time I decided to try a new window manager and update USE flags to do something like add GTK support for Gnome, or QT for KDE, and obviously remove whatever I had to start with for optimization it would recompile everything. I remember in particular doing something like a fresh Gnome install, starting to use it and realizing I'd missed a USE flag for audio and having to re-compile all the Gnome apps to have them be able to use sound.

Was fun, but brutal in terms of efficiency.

> Gentoo is great, but similar to LFS it is kind of a time suck.

It's a time sink compared to binary distributions, but LFS is a whole order greater when it comes to time sinks. Gentoo automates almost everything that you would do by hand in LFS. Compile time doesn't count as it's not your time being used.

Wouldn’t nix be the go to source based distro these days?